Battleborn: Stories, by Claire Vaye Watkins (Riverhead; 288 pages; $25.95). Watkins' debut collection is a treat. She takes the beauty and the emptiness of the American West and employs it as a backdrop for each meticulously crafted tale.

Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter (Harper; 337 pages; $25.99). Walter's poignant, comical and marvelous novel brings several figures together in a quest for answers to a host of questions big and little, cosmic and personal.

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories, by Sherman Alexie (Grove; 465 pages; $27). Tenderness and passion are elements as pervasive in Alexie's impressive body of work as his subversive humor, grief and outrage over the exploitation and neglect of indigenous people in the United States.

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel (Henry Holt; 410 pages; $28). Mantel's sequel to "Wolf Hall" is a swiftly moving, entertaining and erudite work of historical fiction.

Building Stories, by Chris Ware (Pantheon; boxed set; $50). Ware's inventive graphic novel is a treasure box of books, pamphlets, leaflets and other elements that let us in on the private lives of the residents of a Chicago building.

Capital, by John Lanchester (Norton; 527 pages; $26.95). Lanchester's first-rate novel totes up the human costs of the financial crisis on a single London street.

City of Bohane, by Kevin Barry (Graywolf; 277 pages; $25). Barry's lively, original and charismatic voice distinguishes his emotionally rich first novel about a gangland boss in a futuristic Ireland.

Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston (Norton; 306 pages; $25.95). Houston is a wonderful writer, and the graceful vignettes in her novel - about the wider sphere of romance the world has to offer - are by turns beautiful, slyly funny and heart-stopping.

Dirt, by David Vann (Harper; 258 pages; $25.99). Set in Central California in the 1980s, Vann's novel is about degradation at the hands of family and greed and lust. Its willingness to follow its characters into their self-made tragedies is brave and brilliant.

The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller (Knopf; 336 pages; 24.95). Nothing is black or white in Heller's ravishing doomsday novel. In the midst of all the devastation, he shows us the stunning beauty of the natural world.

Drifting House, by Krys Lee (Viking; 210 pages; $25.95). In Lee's stories, set in a variety of locales - North Korea, South Korea, America - the simplicity and restraint of the writer come to the fore: declarative sentences, no fulsome descriptions despite the exotic locales of some of her stories.

Enchantment: New and Selected Stories, by Thaisa Frank (Counterpoint; 320 pages; $16.95). In her varied, imaginative and often metaphorical means of capturing emotional truth, Frank has created an honest, affecting and mesmerizing book.

Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, by Lucia Perillo (Norton; 211 pages; $23.95). Fans of Raymond Carver will enjoy Perillo's mucky, Kmart realism. She raises her own tattered flag upon familiar territory.

HHhH, by Laurent Binet; translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 327 pages; $26). This brilliant, haunting novel centers on a daring 1942 plan that saw two freedom fighters parachute into Nazi-occupied territory and assassinate the Nazi ruler of Bohemia and Moravia.

Hold It 'Til It Hurts, by T. Geronimo Johnson (Coffee House; 343 pages; $15.95). Of the many journeys Johnson's first novel invites us on, the most poignant is the veteran's journey back into civilian life, attempting to unlearn behaviors that ensured survival but are now suddenly deplorable.

Home, by Toni Morrison (Knopf; 145 pages; $24). In Morrison's arresting novel, a Korean War veteran travels to the Jim Crow South to rescue his sister.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti (Henry Holt; 306 pages; $25). Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral and sexy, this "novel from life" employs a grab bag of literary forms and narrative styles on its search for truth.

In One Person, by John Irving (Simon & Schuster; 425 pages; $28). Irving's 13th novel moves from Vermont in the '50s to San Francisco and New York in the AIDS-ravaged '80s to the diversity-friendly 21st century. It's an eventful trip, full of sexual longing, comedy, tragedy and changing identities.

In the Kingdom of Men, by Kim Barnes (Knopf; 322 pages; $24.95). With courage and zest, Barnes' novel takes an intimate look at American oil workers in 1960s Saudi Arabia.

Inside, by Alix Ohlin (Knopf; 258 pages; $25). Ohlin's dynamic novel is about the desire to make a difference in another person's life and the difficult odds against actually doing so.

Jack Holmes and His Friend, by Edmund White (Bloomsbury; 392 pages; $26). White's novel asks sincere questions about the nature of intimacy between two men when one is gay and one is straight.

Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012, by Adrienne Rich (Norton; 530 pages; $39.95). To read through this posthumous collection is to see how careful, how unpredictable and how introspective this most outspoken of poets could be.

Magnificence, by Lydia Millet (Norton; 255 pages; $25.95). The unnervingly talented Millet completes a trilogy of economical but intellectually packed novels set in and around Los Angeles.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 288 pages; $25). In Sloan's debut novel, set in a quirky quasi-real but also semi-surreal version of the Bay Area, the magical, the technological, the absurd and the imaginary all fuse.

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante; translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Europa; 331 pages; $17). In her fourth novel, the first in a trilogy, Ferrante brilliantly examines a fraught friendship.

The News From Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story, by Joan Wickersham (Knopf; 208 pages; $24.95). Although Wickersham writes with an almost grave formality, she is brutal and funny too.

No One Is Here Except All of Us, by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead; 328 pages; $26.95). If a book can be said to have a consciousness, the consciousness in Ausubel's debut novel - set in a Romanian village during the Holocaust - is infinitely tender and soulful, magical and true.

NW, by Zadie Smith (The Penguin Press; 401 pages; $26.95). The London of Smith's novel, called "NW" after the northwest corner of the city, is a fluid, mercurial thing. More than a city, it's a city's consciousness she's written here.

The Odditorium: Stories, by Melissa Pritchard (Bellevue Literary Press; 256 pages; $14.95 paperback). These are stories willing to look anywhere, at anyone: a woman who stitches an Easter bonnet from her own hair, a man who regurgitates an albino mouse named FDR. Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine.

The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson (Random House; 443 pages; $26). Johnson's ambitious second novel is a harrowing, clever, incomparable riff on life in Kim Jong Il's North Korea.

Perla, by Carolina De Robertis (Knopf; 236 pages; $25.95). De Robertis' impressive novel tells the story of the daughter of a man who carried out atrocities in Argentina and of how she has to come to terms with her legacy.

Ring of Bone: Collected Poems, by Lew Welch; foreword by Gary Snyder (City Lights; 256 pages; $17.95). The luminous poems by the man who left behind a suicide note in 1971 - and has never been seen since - feel as vibrant today as when they first burst from the wellsprings of creativity in his head.

San Miguel, by T.C. Boyle (Viking; 367 pages; $27.95). Boyle gives us a saga of three women who are brought to the Channel Islands and try to survive the brutality of their dreams.

Shout Her Lovely Name, by Natalie Serber (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 226 pages; $24). Serber's debut story collection plunges us into the humid heat and lightning of a perfect storm: that of American mothers and daughters struggling for power, love, meaning and identity.

Stay Awake: Stories, by Dan Chaon (Ballantine; 254 pages; $25). Chaon is a gifted short-story writer and is able to manipulate the form to maximum effect by creating original narratives that speak to the larger truths of grief and loss.

Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 304 pages; $26.95). McEwan's more-than-nourishing tale is as much, if not more, an account of the London literary world in the 1970s as it is one of British espionage.

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon (Harper; 468 pages; $27.99). Revolving around a record store that's threatened with extinction, Chabon's novel is a bighearted, exuberantly written and very funny account of life in Oakland's Temescal borderland, circa 2004.

This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead; 213 pages; $26.95). Díaz's vigorous, dialogue-rich stories delve into the passions of the young in the United States and Dominican Republic.

Three Strong Women, by Marie NDiaye; translated from the French by John Fletcher (Knopf; 293 pages; $25.95). NDiaye's tripartite novel examines bravely and from both sides the collision of Europe and Africa and the significance this collision has had and continues to have on black and white lives.

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine (Europa / Tonga; 172 pages; $15). In Levine's crackling satire, an unnamed 25-year-old tells the story of how she stumbled into Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island."

Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, by D.A. Powell (Graywolf; 108 pages; $22). In his latest collection, the poet addresses age-old questions and presents a finely textured atlas of experience and desire.

The Vanishers, by Heidi Julavits (Doubleday; 284 pages; $26.95). Julavits' novel is part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery, part absurdist romp, part neurological novel. Her characters are as earnestly bizarre as Haruki Murakami's, and she's as funny as Lorrie Moore.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple (Little, Brown; 330 pages; $25.99). Semple, in her send-up of Seattle, has a gift for satirizing the rich and the silly.

A Working Theory of Love, by Scott Hutchins (The Penguin Press; 328 pages; $25.95). Hutchins' inventive, intelligent and sometimes hilarious first novel probes the nexus of philosophy, engineering and the machinery of consciousness.

The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown; 230 pages; $24.99). Written by an Iraq war veteran, this novel does a superb job of balancing the impersonal (war) and the personal (us).

NONFICTION

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 290 pages; $22). Bechdel's graphic novel is not only a mordantly funny inquiry of Bechdel's intellectually curious but distant mother, but also a profound look at intimacy, sexuality, art and religion.

Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars, by Sonia Faleiro (Black Cat; 225 pages; $15). Faleiro's book is an excellent, painstaking and often painful investigation of Mumbai's seedier nightclubs.

The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, by David Thomson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 595 pages; $35). Thomson's wily and wistful history of cinema is as unfettered and full frontal an expression of movie lust as film criticism gets.

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, by Florence Williams (Norton; 338 pages; $25.95). Williams has done us all a tremendous favor in ferreting out and clarifying the past, the present and the future of breasts in prose that is clear, clean and laced with humor and common sense.

Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner, by Lily Raff McCaulou (Grand Central; 321 pages; $24.99). McCaulou clearly conveys that there is a right way to hunt and to be active in both the American hunting community and the conservationist community.

Cézanne: A Life, by Alex Danchev (Pantheon; 512 pages; $40). Anything but a popularization, this biography makes a complicated artist more complex. But its rewards are many.

Crazy Brave: A Memoir, by Joy Harjo (Norton; 169 pages; $24.95). Harjo's spirited memoir describes her journey across the heartland of American Indian territory, and traces her inner passage from girlhood to womanhood.

David Park: A Painter's Life, by Nancy Boas (UC; 357 pages; $49.95). Boas' much-needed and thorough biography tells the tragic story of the San Francisco artist who died at age 49 in 1960.

Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis, by Mark Binelli (Metropolitan; 318; $28). Binelli aims for more than tragedy - and that's one reason his book stands as the single best thing to read if you want to understand what Detroit feels like today.

Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben Macintyre (Crown; 399 pages; $26). Macintyre's complex, absorbing final installment in his trilogy about World War II espionage describes in entertaining detail how Allied Forces gained that advantage and used it to take the beaches at Normandy.

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, by Alice Kaplan (University of Chicago; 289 pages; $26). Kaplan weaves together a fascinating triple portrait of three unrelated characters who each spent a pivotal year in Paris.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.T. Max (Viking; 356 pages; $27.95). Drawing on the rich resources of letters, interviews and Wallace's writings, Max skillfully illuminates the author's private and public lives in a well-crafted, insightful chronicle.

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King, by Rich Cohen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 270 pages; $27). As Cohen shows in his eminently readable biography, Sam Zemurray could be ruthless, but he left a legacy as a philanthropist as well.

Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas: How a Bedroom Arrest Decriminalized Gay Americans, by Dale Carpenter (Norton; 345 pages; $29.95). Carpenter's excellent book is not only an in-depth study of the complicated background of a landmark Supreme Court case, but also a highly informative, even thrilling account of how the court arguments reshaped American law, possibly even inadvertently leading to the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Fraternity, by Diane Brady (Spiegel & Grau; 242 pages; $25). Brady retraces the life trajectories of five outstanding African American members of the College of the Holy Cross class of 1972, each of whom had been wooed to the school by a bold and brave Jesuit priest.

A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi, by Aman Sethi (Norton; 230 pages; $24.95). Sethi's book serves as an important reminder that beneath the glitter of official India's economic aspirations to global presence, there is an underclass that still lives in the shadows of India's shine.

God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, by Victoria Sweet (Riverhead; 372 pages; $27.95). With its colorful cast of characters battling the tide of history, Sweet's book - about Laguna Honda Hospital, the last almshouse in the United States - is a remarkable journey into the essence of medicine.

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places, by Bernie Krause (Little, Brown; 278 pages; $26.99). Krause has recorded the sounds of more than 15,000 animal species and their natural ambience, and his often poetic and thoroughly entertaining book reflects his passion.

The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, by Kevin Young (Graywolf; 483 pages; $25). Young's book is a supremely stylish tribute to generations of creative African Americans.

Joseph Anton: A Memoir, by Salman Rushdie (Random House; 636 pages; $30). Rushdie's riveting memoir captures how it felt to be reviled and endangered by violent strangers because of a book that most had never read.

Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism's Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist, by Thomas Peele (Crown; 441 pages; $26). Peele masterfully draws a line from the "radical faith" that the scars of slavery and Jim Crow helped popularize to the bullets that turned Chauncey Bailey into "a First Amendment martyr."

Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood, by Anne Enright (Norton; 207 pages; $24.95). Written after the births of her daughter and son, Enright's witty collection of essays showcases the author's unmistakably Irish sense of gloom as well as her tenderness.

Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, by Daniel Levin Becker (Harvard University; 338 pages; $27.95). In this dazzling and at times breathtakingly loony book, Levin Becker chronicles his fascination with a group of mostly French experimental writers known as the Oulipo.

Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve; 106 pages; $22.99). The late author's famed perspicacity, vitriol and wit are fully intact in this series of essays that appeared in Vanity Fair.

Oblivion: A Memoir, by Héctor Abad; translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 263 pages; $26). Written without fanfare, Abad's memoir - about the assassination of his father, in Colombia - is an extraordinary meditation on loss.

On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, by William Souder (Crown; 496 pages; $30). Souder tells a suspenseful tale of the literary life, pending environmental devastation and Carson's struggle with breast cancer, which took a turn for the worse as she was writing "Silent Spring."

On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War, by Bernard Wasserstein (Simon & Schuster; 552 pages; $32.50). Wasserstein's enthralling, heartbreaking book chronicles the end of an era.

On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future, by Karen Elliott House (Knopf; 308 pages; $28.95). Provocative, rich with authenticity and insight, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in human rights, global politics and the future of the weakening Saudi state.

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, by David Nasaw (The Penguin Press; 868 pages; $40). Nasaw, a scrupulous and skillful historian, provides an exhaustive examination of Kennedy's public and private lives.

People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished From the Streets of Tokyo - and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up, by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 454 pages; $18). Parry has written a thoughtful book about an inevitably sensational subject.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll (The Penguin Press; 685 pages; $36). Coll's masterful book is a riveting and appalling study of Big Oil's biggest player.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy (Viking; 275 pages; $25.95). Wasik and Murphy mount a persuasively argued case for the importance of rabies as both a daunting public health issue, past and present, and a persistent source of deep-rooted terror.

The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (Yale University; 693 pages; $35). Whether you're a scholar interested in 20th century figures or a fan interested in the private exchanges of the most publicized stars of their era, these diaries fascinate.

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador From Venus: A Biography, by Lisa Jarnot (UC; 560 pages; $39.95). Jarnot's dazzling and exhaustive biography is at its best charting the origins of Duncan's poetics, tracing his family and friends, and setting him in San Francisco's brilliant literary postwar decades.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen (Norton; 587 pages; 28.95). Quammen surveys the diseases that have erupted out of the animal world into humans, and in the process tells numerous gripping tales of scientific derring-do.

Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 734 pages; $40). Rosenfeld's deftly woven account presents a new and encompassing perspective of the UC Berkeley student revolt, including a revisionist view of Ronald Reagan and a detailed picture of FBI corruption.

Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, by Andrew Preston (Knopf; 815 pages; $37.50). In his magnificent study, Preston inserts religion systematically into the history of American wars and diplomacy.

The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, by Joyce Johnson (Viking; 489 pages; $32.95). Johnson's biography has a lot going for it, including the author's own confidence-inspiring voice that plunges readers into the maelstrom of Kerouac's intensely creative and yet intensely self-destructive life.

Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture, by Daniel Mendelsohn (New York Review Books; 423 pages; $24.95). Mendelsohn's collection adds up to more than the sum of its parts, displaying an impressive range, depth and nobility of mind.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (Knopf; 315 pages; $25.95). Strayed's remarkable memoir of her summer spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail is both an adventure story and an extended contemplation of loss.

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room, by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon; 228 pages; $24). An unclassifiable little gem, "Zona" is Dyer's book-length personal essay about Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker."